As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
The increased use of technology and computers has generated a corresponding increase in digital data. This ever-increasing digital data requires a corresponding ever-increasing amount of storage space. The need for storage space for digital data has been fueled through many changes in society. For example, home computer users' increased storage of multimedia data, especially video and photographic data, has served to increase the amount of storage space needed. Likewise, industry also requires increased storage space. As more and more business is being conducted electronically, there has been an ever-increasing demand and need for the storage of this vast amount of business data. Furthermore, there has been a demand to digitize the storage of once paper files in an attempt to decrease the overhead cost of this paper generation and storage.
With this increase of digital data, there has been a corresponding further reliance upon the integrity, required accessibility, and throughput of the digital data that is included in storage pools. Across the network (and/or locally), a storage pool may be synchronized to another storage pool, and the storage pool may have subtle but serious errors (and/or warnings) that may not be possible for a user to detect until after a volume failure occurs, which may adversely affect performance and/or integrity of the storage pool and/or devices on the network. Solutions are needed to address this deficiency in monitoring for and detecting errors in a pool of prior to a failure of volume (including but not limited to a failure of an entire volume).
Existing approaches fail to provide a solution for monitoring and detecting user-invisible errors in order to prevent synchronous replication volumes from getting out of sync. Some existing tools (see IBM XIV Storage System: Copy Services and Migration, Draft Document for Review, Jan. 23, 2011) monitor a storage array to determine an amount of disk space remaining, in order to prevent the array from running out of space, but not to prevent a synchronous replication volume from getting out of sync. Other existing tools, such as a Site Recovery Manager (see VMWARE VCENTER Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Datasheet, July 2014, hereinafter “SRM”) and Data Protection Manager (see VMWARE's VSPHERE Data Protection Administration Guide, Version 5.1, June 2012, hereinafter “Data Protection Manager”) also fail to provide such a solution.